The context for the photo is obvious from recent news, but the history of the phrase and the tradition was unknown to me. I found the following at Vinepair:

One of the oldest instances of pouring one out—technically known as making a libation—comes from Ancient Egypt,
where the liquid offering for the dead was typically water (the rhythms
of the Nile River being a source of life and death, that seems pretty
apt). There’s even biblical... reference to
the practice. Per Genesis 35:14,
“Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him [God],
even a pillar of stone. He poured out a drink offering on it and poured
oil on it.” Not quite an offering for the dead so much as, well,
Yahweh, but still, we have the concept of pouring liquid out as an act
of reverence...

The Greeks had two kinds of libation, spondai and choai.
Whereas choai were “poured out entirely and were used for libations to
the gods of the underworld, the heroes and the dead,” spondai meant a
“controlled outpouring of a small amount of liquid for the Olympian
gods,” that liquid usually being wine.

Ancient Rome, unabashed copycat of Ancient Greece, also incorporated the
practice of libation, both as an offering to the gods and as a means to
honor the dead.

"She was born just after the end of WWI and would have been 26 when the second world war ended. To live through Churchill's tenure and now her
son won an Oscar for portraying him, that's pretty amazing."

Bence Viola from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
in Leipzig discovered the tooth fragments together with Russian
colleagues in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. Initially, he
thought the inconspicuous-looking object was the molar of a cave bear.
But when the remaining fragments of the tooth turned up, it became
obvious that the researchers had found the tooth of a hominid. It was
too large, however, to be from a modern man or Neanderthal. When the
researchers finally succeeded in decoding the DNA of the tooth, their
suspicion was confirmed: it hailed from a previously unknown early human
species living in Asia at least 30,000 years ago.

Because of the cool climate in the location of the Denisova Cave, the discovery benefited from DNA's ability to survive for longer periods at lower temperatures. The average annual temperature of the cave remains at 0°C, which has contributed to the preservation of archaic DNA among the remains discovered. The analysis indicated that modern humans, Neanderthals, and the Denisova hominin last shared a common ancestor around 1 million years ago.
The mtDNA analysis further suggested this new hominin species was the result of an early migration out of Africa, distinct from the later out-of-Africa migrations associated with Neanderthals and modern humans, but also distinct from the earlier African exodus of Homo erectus. Pääbo noted the existence of this distant branch creates a much more complex picture of humankind during the Late Pleistocene... David Reich of Harvard University, in collaboration with Mark Stoneking of the Planck Institute team, found genetic evidence that Denisovan ancestry is shared by Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and smaller scattered groups of people in Southeast Asia, such as the Mamanwa, a Negrito people in the Philippines.

And what a superb cave; no wonder it maintained its real estate value for tens of thousands of years. The narration accompanying the slideshow is concise and superb; this video will be of interest to anyone with even a smidgeon of curiosity about archaeology or human prehistory.

There's too much to cover here in a short post, but I'll sketch what I understand as the basics. Denisovans were ?pre-humans/proto-humans of the genus Homo who died out as a species. They were genetically distinct from us, but some of their genes are present in modern humans. The distribution of those genes today is not random, as shown by the figure above.

“We haven’t been a very exclusive species, with a very narrow
origin,” said Martin Jacobsson. Interbreeding with other members of the
human family tree “is not a unique event. It’s a more complex story than
we thought before.”

In a study published Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Jacobsson and co-author Pontus Skoglund searched through 1,500 human
genome scans from around the world for genes found in Denisovans but not
chimpanzees or Neanderthals.

While the previous finding of Denisovan inheritance involved analysis
of ultra-high-resolution human genome scans, of which only a few exist,
Jacobsson used low-resolution scans. These are more commonly available
and allowed the researchers to detect Denisovan signals in genomes from
mainland southeast Asia. A signal also appeared in South America, but
Jacobsson said that’s probably a false positive.

DNA from another human-like primate, the Denisovans,
lurks in modern genomes, too. A molar and a chip of pinkie bone found
in a Siberian cave provide what little information we have about this
species. DNA extracted from the fragments previously revealed
cross-species breeding. Yet a new study in the journal Cell shows
the ancient hanky-panky did not stop in Siberia: Humans who traveled
across South Asia mated with a separate group of Denisovans, as well.

“This is a breakthrough paper,” said David Reich,
who studies ancient DNA at Harvard University and was not involved with
the study. “It's a definite third interbreeding event,” one that adds
to the previously known Denisovan and Neanderthal mixtures.

Humans and Neanderthals divided into separate groups as far back as 765,000 years ago. Denisovans
and Neanderthals were closer cousins who split more recently and then
vanished — perhaps because we absorbed their lineages...

All groups studied, from British and
Bengali people to Peruvians and Puerto Ricans, had a dense cluster that
closely matched the Altai Neanderthals. Some populations also had a
cluster that matched the Altai Denisovans, which was particularly
pronounced in East Asians.

The surprise was a
third cluster — not like the Neanderthal DNA and only partially
resembling the Altai Denisovans. This, the authors concluded, was a
second and separate pulse of Denisovan genes into the DNA blender.

Logs the size of telephone poles drift along the shore of the Salish
Sea. Erik Hammond turns the wheel of his aluminum skiff and closes in.
He grabs his ax and towlines, then leaps atop the floating wood, much as
his father did, and his father did before him. With the butt of his ax
he drives anchor pegs into the choicest three and ties them to the
stern... Hammond and Moore are beachcombers, or log salvors, based in Gibsons, British Columbia.. They are practitioners of an occupation once common on the Pacific Northwest coast...

Driftwood makes an enormous if underappreciated contribution to the food web connecting the forests and the sea... Driftwood, it turns out, is also rapidly disappearing...

Immense logjams and floating rafts of naturally occurring wood were once
common and well-documented features in rivers and estuaries before they
were cleared for navigation. The Great Raft on Louisiana’s Red River,
perhaps the most famous, existed for an estimated 375 years before its
removal in 1830...

Kramer’s research shows that driftwood serves as building blocks for
stable sand dunes and spits in estuaries, providing an important buffer
from rising tides and waves. But shorelines around the world—especially
in developed, temperate zones—are now severely wood impoverished
compared to their condition before human settlement. As rivers lose
driftwood, water travels through faster and there is less time for
nutrient cycling...

About 1.2 billion golf balls are manufactured every year, according to a 2017 report in Chemical & Engineering News, and more than half may be lost in the environment. A New York Times
story in 2010 reported that an estimated 300 million disappear each
year in the United States alone. With many of the planet’s approximately
32,000 golf courses located beside the ocean, countless golf balls find
their way into the water, where they sink and accumulate more rapidly
than anyone is cleaning them up.

Weber, a grade 12 student, is doing her best, but is barely putting a
dent in the collection of drowned balls. Just two weeks earlier, Weber
and her father spent several hours snorkeling in the same cove and
cleared the seafloor of about 2,000 balls.

Now, the ocean bottom is again awash with golf balls. “Big waves come through and uncover them,” says Weber, who started
collecting golf balls here in 2016. “It can sometimes make what we’re
doing feel futile.”..

They don’t just sit inertly on the seafloor, either. As Weber has documented, they corrode.

In fact, golf balls have been found in the stomachs of at least two gray
whales found dead in Washington State—one in 2010, the other in
2012—though the balls were not identified as the cause of either death.
Golf balls also appear in bird stomachs on occasion—something Steiner
says he has seen scores of times while inspecting decayed albatross
carcasses in the northwestern Hawai‘ian Islands. Golf balls may even find their way into birds’ reproductive tracts—in one documented case, a golf ball encased in shell was laid by a Canada goose.

I was gobsmacked by both the price and the degree of specialization. I started playing golf 60 years ago using a set of clubs from Montgomery Ward comprised of a driver, 3-wood, putter, sand wedge, and 3- 5- 7- and 9-irons. I later added and mastered an 8-iron for greenside play. Wedges became a growth industry several decades later:

Since the mid-80s the number of wedges available to players has grown
from 2 (pitching and sand) to 5 (adding gap, lob and ultra lob), most of
which are now available in a wide array of lofts and bounces to allow a player to "fine-tune" their short game with the wedges that best meet
their needs. In some cases, with the high degree of customization,
companies have done away with the traditional names for each club, and
instead simply label each club with its loft and bounce angles. A 52-8
wedge, for example, would have 52 degrees of loft and 8 degrees of
bounce, generally placing it in the "gap wedge" class. Most players
carry three or four wedges on the course, and sometimes more, usually
sacrificing one or two of their long irons and/or higher-lofted fairway
woods to meet the 14-club limit.

The degree of loft is relatively easy to understand, as per the graph embedded at the top showing relative trajectories for a Lob wedge (60-64 degrees), Sand wedge (54-58), Gap wedge (50-53), and Pitching wedge (40-48).The "bounce" factor is more complex:

Bounce is the group name for the elements involved in sole design: the
bounce angle, sole width, leading edge, rocker and camber of a wedge. Bounce, and specifically the bounce angle, is added to prevent a wedge
from digging into sand or turf, stopping the momentum of the club
through the ball. Wedges with minimal bounce will be better suited to players who sweep the ball, taking a shallower divot, firmer turf conditions (i.e. links courses)...

For "links courses" read "public golf courses where the turf bakes into concrete in the summer."Only the most fanatic golfers will move onward to read about "grinds" in this article about Vokey wedges. More at this interview with Bob Vokey at the Titleist website.

(The fonts got all mixed up in this post and I can't seem to fix the problem. Moving on...)

In 1986, the world was shocked when
reports of infants undergoing major surgery with
out
anesthesia
arose in both the USA
and
UK.
In the USA, mothers of two premature infants wrote
letters
to the medical journal, BIRTH, protesting the “barbarism of surgery without anesthesia.”..

Why did infants not receive
anesthesia that was comparable to that received by an adult?
In the following years, numerous
books and articles were written on the subject
. A survey of such literature reveals
that the two
repeatedly cited reasons
were: 1. Infants do not have the capacity
to perceive pain. 2. It is
too risky
to use potent anesthetics on infants, given the risk for cardiorespiratory compromise and death...

The
19th
century surgeon was rough, having inherited an attitude of
indifference to pain from the days
predating anesthesia. It was said
that the role of a surgeon was to preserve life and not to prevent
the temporary pain of the experience.
As such, the use of anesthesia was originally restricted to
those considered sensitive, primarily the rich, white
and educated women
and children...

...one of the two consistently
cited reasons
for
the withholding of
anesthesia
from neonates was
the belief that infants are insensitive to pain.
When the American
Academy of Pediatrics released its statement
on neonatal anesthesia in 1987, it cited the
commonly taught
rationale that “nerve pathways [in neonates] are not sufficiently myelinated to
transmit painful
stimuli or that neonates do not
have sufficiently integrated cortical function to
recall painful experiences...

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
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